Aussies take a novel approach to porn

While the Aussie government is frantically trying to censor Internet porn by building a Chinese style web filter, it is proving less hard on government employees who surf for the stuff during work hours.

Recently there was a scandal down under when it was discovered that government workers were spending a lot of work time downloading porn on their tax-payer funded computers. Now the Sydney Morning Herald has discovered that the NSW Parliament will not discipline or even identify staff members or MPs who used the parliamentary computer system to access websites that contained ''sexually explicit images of young people''.

The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Richard Torbay, and the President of the Legislative Council, Amanda Fazio, have declared the matter closed and stuck his fingers in his ears and went La, la, la when hacks asked questions about the matter. The Crown Solicitor was that there was ''no legal obligation to refer the information in the report to the NSW Police Force''.

While it is all an obvious breach of the Parliament's IT guidelines the fact that no staff or MPs who accessed the pornographic sites will remain secret means that everyone is getting away scot free. The sites should have been caught in Parliament's web filter, ContentKeeper, which is so strict it classified personal web-based email such as Yahoo!, sport, news, fashion and food sites as adult content.

Australia is putting an emphasis on web filters as part of a national plan, but if they can't get them to work on a small scale, then the question remains how they can get them to go on a national level. It seems that with both MPs and government workers being named and shamed by a classified report on the matter, no one is keen to do anything about it. As a result the report is being hushed up until a whistleblower passes it onto the media.